Fitting Square Pegs Into Round Holes

I hate cookie-cutter programs you find in magazines or on websites. Everyone is different - different needs, goals, posture, strength, training experience, injury history, etc. the list goes on an on. I used to think if an exercise was good, it would be good for everyone. I used to take a random exercise from Men's/Women's Health Magazine and throw it into a client's program. I used to think if a client's back was hurting, they needed to strengthen it. I expect I'll come up with a lot more "I used to..." statements in the future, but I like to think that means that I'm progressing as a trainer. The first time I realized that I didn't know everything was when my clients start achieving better results. Oscar Wilde's quote "I am not young enough to know everything" really hit home for me. Without furder ado, here are 5 mistakes I've made in the
past:

1) Overhead pressing on an overly kyphotic thoracic spine: I've mentioned this in the past, but I'll go over it again. Push your shoulders forward and poke your chin out in front of you. From there try to raise your arms overhead. You will not be able to get your arms directly overhead. In a person with good posture and optimal mobility in their thoracic spine, the scapula will have enough room to tilt posteriorly in order to raise the arms overhead. However, on a person with poor posture and poor mobility, the scapula will be "stuck" in a position of anterior tilt. This is a very unstable position for your scapulo-thoracic joint, and very risky to put it under external load. Our deltoids get more than enough work on pushups, bench presses, and other horizontal pushing exercises to justify the risk/reward ratio in this scenario.

2) Doing an exercise to get increase performance for the same exercise. I couldn't really think of a way to phrase that any better, but I'll show you what I mean. We've all seen this at the gym:


The guy who does 50 pushups in a row barely moving his arms, and doing an awesome job of looking like a seal. If I were to train him, would I tell him to just do more pushups? No, he looks like a seal because he has zero core stability. I would tell him to perform more core stability work (ie. planks, pallof press, etc.) and to set aside his ego and execute the pushups on an incline to work on his form.
What about the side plank?

I used to think the side plank trained only the obliques (the muscles that run along the side of your abdominals). I didn't realize how much the lats, shoulders, and glutes came into play during this effective exercise. When my clients exhibited poor side plank times - my only expert solution was to just do more side planks! I started to realize that once I increased upper body pulling strength, as well as shoulder stability - side plank times improved dramatically.

Overhead Squat:

Overhead squats are extremely difficult. They require a great deal of mobility in your ankles, hips, shoulders, and thoracic spine. When my client's couldn't go low enough, I looked at all the possible contributing mobility factors. Were their ankles stiff? Were their hips immobile? Take a look at these two guys performing the OH Squat:


I would have originally thought maybe there were some hip flexor tightness, or maybe a restriction at the ankle joint. But now, take a look when they lay down on the floor on their backs:



Without having to support themselves, the mobility issues, for the most part, seem to clear right up. This means that the limiting factor happens to be stability and not mobility. In an upright position, when the body is lowering down into an overhead squat - if there is not enough core stability, the body will literally "shut itself down" as a defense mechanism to halt any sort of perceived danger placed upon it. As a result, I started to work on a lot more more anti-extension exercises such as planks, stability ball rollouts, and tall kneeling chops and lifts to help clear up this dysfunctional movement pattern.


3) Using soreness as an indicator of a good workout: It seems like everyone who goes to the gym uses soreness as an indicator of how effective a workout is. Consequently, many trainers seem to make it their number one priority to make their clients sore. Soreness usually occurs after the muscles experience a different stimulus than it normally does (new exercises, more repetitions, more sets, more time under tension). Beginners tend to get very sore extremely easily because nearly everything they do will "shock" their body. Now, if there's no added benefit to strength, hypertophy, endurance, etc. by being sore, why would I try to make my client feel crippled the next day? To possibly hinder their next workout, or their ability to walk upstairs? I can manipulate workouts to create this effect, but I'd rather focus my attention on getting optimal results. If soreness occurs as a result, then so be it.

4) Emphasizing strength too early in beginners: I used to try to progress my beginner clients way too quickly in an effort to accelerate results. Beginners experience adaptations with 40% of their max load and with only one or two sets of any given exercise. More is less in this situation as it could result in overtraining. However, for intermediate to advanced clients, more sets and higher loads will be needed to yield similar adaptations. According to Dr. Vladimir Zatziorsky in his book Science and Practice of Strength Training, a beginner should wait three years before progressing onto maximal strength work to develop the necessary connective tissue in order to handle the high loads. I think this definitely depends on the person, but I would still wait at least a year before trying to progress into strength-based workouts.


5) If it hurt's, don't do it!: This applies more for myself than my clients. I used to "man up" and work through the pain in my shoulders. I made no gains, and was constantly in pain. Only when I started performing some soft tissue work (with a foam roller and tennis ball), mobility work, improved my scapular stability, and stopped doing exercises that hurt was I able to perform at my best. I switched bench presses with pushupsand floor press, barbell overhead presses for dumbells presses, and did a ton of corrective exercises for my lower traps and serratus anterior. The result was a 70 pound increase in my bench press in four months, and more importantly - healthy shoulders.

Train Hard (and Smart)!

Jason